In May-July 2024, thirteen participants took part in the second edition of the Online Creative Residency from Europeana’s Digital Storytelling Festival. Heather Storgaard discovered comparisons between family history and personal experience.
Exploring the theme of 'journey', participants worked with mentors in animation, social media, collage art, storytelling with 3D, and creative writing.
On Youth
Clearing out my husband’s childhood farm last year, I opened a fragile blue-grey album and expected to see family photographs. Instead, delicate, thick postcards teetered on the edge of falling on to my knee. I asked what they were and was told to throw them away – there were far too many papers to keep everything.
Frantically packing, still half-ill from a bout of winter pneumonia, I decided I would like to read them later. So they were thrown in a box, one of fifteen that were filled with heavy papers and photographs, a 1930s German typewriter and an ornate writing box, padded with tartan blankets and Norwegian knitwear, then driven down from Jutland to IJmuiden and carried across the North Sea on our familiar route home to Scotland.
I didn’t look at them until this summer, when I unfolded evidence of a decade of interwar criss-crossing of Europe - a series of postcards written in three languages that have all since changed their spelling rules. They belonged to my husband’s grandfather Anton, who I never met and he doesn’t really remember, but with whom I seemingly share a great love for travel and, to my delight, a birthday.
We are taught in school and through documentaries that interwar life was a challenging, dark time of putsches, and of the rebuilding and re-drawing of borders, peacefully or not. I imagined it to be a bleak time to be young, a perspective reinforced by the black and white photos of the period - like those I discovered on Europeana.eu.
But in these family documents I found pages and pages of beautifully illustrated fairytale-towns and dreamy landscapes, traversed by bold, self-aware, kind, precocious young people with a drive to explore that speaks to me as if they are my own peers. They were Christliche Pfadfinder, a kind of youth organisation popular in Protestant communities in Germany and beyond.
Swept up in their journeys, squinting at every pencil-smudged word to translate their banalities, I manage somehow to be shocked at their abrupt 1930s final act.
Youth mobility - a wish to explore the world and find one’s own place in it. No matter the generation, it’s a ubiquitous part of growing up that everyone thinks is theirs alone. While each generation is named more selfish, less capable than the one before, really, we’re all embarking on a well-trodden path that twists and diverts with each of us. Whether you travel by Interrail or the Orient Express, take a German Lutheran pilgrimage to Palestine by sea or volunteer on an Israeli Kibbutz, the experience of personal growth is built up journey upon journey.
Ostpreußen, 1924, and Poland, 2019
Dear Anton, hearty greetings from our great Eastern Prussian Journey! We walked from Marienburg and Danzig, over Hohenstein (Tannenberg), Allenstein, Löben to Königsburg and visited the beautiful town here and the harbour. Then we will go to Rossiten, then head back home over Danzig. Good Path, your colleagues Fritz and Hans
Unfamiliar with the placenames? None of the German above is in use anymore. We can find Slavic equivalents to some of it – Rybatschi or Рыбачий, Olsztynek, Malbork and Gdansk. Once the jewel of Prussia, a harbour city whose beauty was clear even to teenage boys, Königsburg was bombed so much that the modern-day Kaliningrad bears little resemblance to its German ancestor. I get strange, melancholy tingles from this postcard, unknowingly sent from a city with only twenty or so years left in its long existence. I attempt a full translation to modern geography and find that a whole district, Löben, was simply never resurrected.
In a final summer of peak-European freedom, before Brits lost the right to freely live and travel in the EU and before Covid devastated travel for everyone, I visited many of these places myself. Now reconstructed with new names and new people, I looked for echoes of the past that proved elusive to me. At the same time, this was an area that didn’t know it was about to be rocked by nearby war again soon.
Flensburg, 1927 and Flensburg, 2024
Dear Parents! I got a few hours of sleep on the way down here, but no more than that. We are staying in the Danish school - Tivoli School.
I feel at home on the edges. There, where people may wonder about my accents but don’t feel a need to fuss, or maybe question, but only out of pure curiosity. I don’t have roots in Flensburg, but here I am allowed to be both Danish and German without conflict. I belong to the majority who have connections on both sides of the border. Earlier this week, I walked past the school where Anton stayed - it’s still there, on the edge of the old Danish churchyard and overlooking the harbour. The Danish minority in Germany’s northernmost state, Schleswig, are still here.
Sometimes, I struggle to understand their Danish, broken but insistent. But I love to listen to it as well, a confirmation of many Danish-ness-es in the beautiful plural form that Denmark is otherwise quite terrible at accepting.
Eckardtsheim, 1928 and Helgenæs, 2021
Dear Anton, Why don’t I hear from you anymore? Have you un-learnt all your German? Were you also out travelling this year?
These are my favourite sentences of any of the postcards. They could just as easily have been written to my husband in one of our long lockdown winters on the farm on Helgenæs, when his aversion to social media messages and the German language peaked. How full of ourselves we are to think that ghosting is something invented with the internet.
The Oranges of Brindisi, from Trieste to Mandate Palestine, 1931
We near Brindisi in southern Italy. Already long before we reach it, we can see how the waves are breaking over the daunting piers, but at sea our nausea is finally improving, and it is teatime - a good load of white bread finds its way to our hungry stomachs. It is time for a short excursion on land, and we get our first impression of the South already here: grey and white houses with flat roofs and tightly packed, narrow streets with grimy inhabitants, but the oranges are cheap and at last our seasickness is conquered. But we are hardly out on the open sea again before half-digested oranges flow about the ship, both indoors and out.
Where is the South? Does it start at the Italian border, still not quite set at this time, or do countries slowly fade into Southerness at some point? Our perspectives depend on our own position, international politics, our states of being. Brindisi is South, but perhaps only 'an impression' of it, rather than the real thing? The architecture is important, a plentifulness of produce perhaps too, but it seems like the 'grimy inhabitants' are also responsible for their Southerness.
Munich 1935-1937 and Munich 2020-2021
There is no writing nor any postcards from Anton’s time in Munich. His friends, Germans he knew from their time in youth groups exploring Italy, cycling around Thüringen’s literature and religious shrines, sailing to Palestine, are gone. Is it a deliberate destruction of records, a silence after too-long ghosting, or was later correspondence simply lost in house moves over the decades? We won’t know, but by 1935 their Christliche Pfadfinder youth organisation was banned and communication between members monitored by the Gestapo soon after.
From Anton’s Munich, there are only official documents and college transcripts, stamped with still-dark, inky swastikas.
While we don’t have postcards, we do have a small envelope of his first photos, offering glimpses of his pre-war Munich. A city of fact and history, no fairytales to be found. One shows the corner where Sparkassenstraße meets the famous Marienplatz, Nazis marching. When my husband and I lived in Munich, we used to sit in the sun outside our favourite coffee shop, right in that spot where he must have stood to take the shot.
Our Munich existed in a time that now feels nearly as distant as his. A foreign, innocent, pre-Covid, pre-Brexit, pre-Russian war-in-Ukraine paradise. Yet his city was still peeping through - our apartment had a balcony facing an empty wasteland where bombs had fallen and nothing had been rebuilt in all that time. The landlady was ancient, had lived in the building as a child and was noticeably upset that a Brit was getting to live in an original, never-bombed-out level of the building, complete with its pre-war flooring.
Europe, 2024
Looking back on these journeys makes me think of all the times this kind of freedom was not possible. I think of Covid exit declarations, multiple tests, proof of destination, arrival registration forms. At its most extreme, I remember having to carry my marriage certificate around. Finishing studies in Munich and leaving with no possibility of return, in the near future at least, which manages to happen twice here. Trying to find yourself, abstract concepts like The South, and your sea legs on a route now completely impossible in its reverse for even the most desperate - youth will always take these journeys blissfully for granted.
About the author
Who am I?
My name is Heather Storgaard, I am a writer and international marketer. Following years living, working and studying in Denmark, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, I am now back in my home country, Scotland. I studied Culture & Heritage at university, then literary translation and will be beginning an MLitt in September.
What is my project about?
My project considers the themes of youth mobility in Europe, taking in the past century. The project was inspired by an album of postcards I found that had belonged to my husband’s grandfather, Anton. He had travelled around Europe as a teenager and young person in the interwar period. The tracks left by this created an image of young people who were much more similar to my generation than I had initially expected. This made me curious about how each generation has a tendency to think we are unique, when in fact we are often exploring paths that may be new to us but are in fact very well-trodden.
Why did I apply for the Online Creative Residency?
I usually work writing in the whisky industry (which is possibly the most Scottish thing about me!), so I saw this Online Creative Residency as a chance to explore other topics and work more creatively. The theme of journeys really spoke to me, which spurred me on to apply.
What have I got out of the residency?
I loved how collaborative and supportive the residency was. Many of us were inspired by similar themes, although our output has been very different.
What will I do next?
In September I will begin an MLitt and have already started some research for that, which I think will take a lot of my time in the coming year. I am hoping to write more about travel in the future and further explore connections across borders and languages in Europe.